Reviews
A Fluctuating Charm: An Uncertain Grace
An Uncertain Grace is a strange, daring and clever novel and Kneen’s openness to connections that many other novelists never dream of making is exhilarating. Her characters wreck themselves with sex and science as they seek ways to live with extinctions, inundations and pollution – and yet Kneen is able to salvage optimism from the wreckage. ‘
In Short Measures: Fragments by Antigone Kefala
The title Fragments refers to more than just the extent of the poems; it also hints at broken-ness, loss, the passage of time that takes us out of life. This is confirmed by the themes Kefala tackles in this collection, most of them pitched in a minor key.’
Love Gets Slanted: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
‘The novel is a genre in the making, this much we know; it is a crucible for metaphysics as well as history; but its heart, its soul lies in itself and in its capacity to undercut monological points of view. Sadly the undercutting is missing in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the ideological celebration, the activist impulse, is all one-sided. There is no acknowledgement of a nation desperately trying to hold itself together.’
Semiologists Beware: The 7th Function of Language
It would be wrong, however, to regard Binet’s novel as not much more than a sophisticated and hugely entertaining send-up. He sees, certainly, the absurd aspects of semiotics and the other ‘sciences’ his characters profess. But he also registers their allure and fascination. The clue to discovering what that allure and fascination might be has to do with the particular source of his preoccupations. When Theory crossed the English Channel, the Atlantic and then travelled to the Antipodes, it left behind its French playfulness.
Good Grief: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Lincoln in the Bardo is a democratic novel in its multi-voiced technique, but it is also concerned with the paradoxical and fragile nature of democracy itself. It raises the question of whether a fractious republic of atomised and unequal individuals, thrown together by circumstance – rich and poor, amusing and unpleasant, masters and slaves, perpetrators and victims – might nevertheless achieve mutual understanding and a common purpose.
Elemental Mysteries
This Water is a collection of fiction – though Farmer continues to explore what the senses can teach us about the permeable barriers between our present world and the mysteries beyond it. Though the five tales in the book stand alone as narratives, they are carefully placed to lead the reader gradually into the imaginative realms where Farmer can examine elemental mysteries. The stories attempt to breach the borders between life and death, air and sea, human and animal life, and, of course, the place where dreams and myth contact our living experience.
A Kaleidoscope of Experience: Ghostspeaking by Peter Boyle
In this new work, Peter Boyle looks away from the centres of Anglophone poetry that so often form the tradition with which Australian poets place themselves in conversation, and instead seeks alternate points of correspondence. The eleven ‘fictive’ poets that he conjures for his reader here are poets that are exist in ‘translation’, from non-existent bodies of work in Spanish and French… The twelfth voice that stitches them together, that of the ‘translator’ we may as well call Peter Boyle, is equally fictive, equally real.’
The Harsh Light of Day: Blue Skies by Helen Hodgman
It is common for Tasmanian literature to be softlit with the kinds of autumnal colours that are so flattering to sandstone convict ruins, a contrast to the red dust and white gums of much mainland Australian writing. Helen Hodgman turns up the intensity, creating a glare under which she examines human desperation and ugliness. It is usual, in writing about Tasmania, for dawns and dusks to proliferate. Instead, Hodgman gives us broad daylight—precisely, a never-ending three o’clock.’